Facebook has now achieved adult status!

The iconic social media platform was officially founded 18 years ago today on Feb. 4, 2004, in a dorm room at Harvard University by friends and roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughe

Over the past near-two decades the parent company behind Facebook — now called Meta — has grown into one of the most well-known, influential and even controversial companies, while the Facebook platform now has billions of users.

As the globe's most loved and loathed social media platform celebrates its 18th birthday, here are 18 fast facts about Facebook — courtesy of Search Engine Journal — that will guarantee to make you feel extra old today.

18 Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Facebook:

  1. Mark Zuckerberg originally only made Facebook available to students at his alma mater, Harvard University. (Okay, if you've watched The Social Network, you probably knew that one.)
  2. Facebook's color scheme is blue because Zuckerberg reportedly suffers from red-green colorblindness.
  3. Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth said that designers pushed for an "awesome" button, but Zuckerberg ultimately vetoed the idea in 2007 and created the "like" button instead.
  4. Al Pacino was the first "face" on Facebook. The site initially displayed an image featuring a man's face disguised by pixels. It later came to light that the face belonged to the famed actor.
  5. Facebook users spend about an hour a day on the platform. The average user spends 58 minutes of their waking day on the service daily.
  6. We don't look at posts for long. We spend an average of 17 seconds on each bit of content.
  7. Usage on Facebook goes way up around 8 AM and 10 PM local time.
  8. Facebook has no stark political lean among its users. According to data, 35 percent of users say they're conservative, 34 percent are liberal and 29 percent are moderate.
  9. Facebook offers more than 100 languages. Fewer than half of Facebook users use the service in English.
  10. You can change your language on Facebook to "Pirate."
  11. The U.S. isn't Facebook's biggest market. More than 260 million people in India use the service, while 186 million users are based in the U.S.
  12. Farmers for Facebook! About 66 percent of American adults in rural areas use Facebook. That makes it more popular than YouTube (64 percent) and Pinterest (26 percent).
  13. Facebook has us hooked: 51 percent of users log on more than once a day.
  14. We get by with a little help from our friends: 88 percent of users say their main reason for signing up for Facebook was "staying close to family and friends."
  15. Teens are ditching Facebook. In 2015, 71 percent of American teens were on Facebook. Today, the number is down to 51 percent.
  16. Women use Facebook more than men do. A Pew Research Center survey found that 75 percent of women use Facebook, versus just 63 percent of men.
  17. There are, on average, 3.74 degrees of separation between any one Facebook user and another. So you are like, that close to Justin Bieber.
  18. You can log your time on Facebook. Click on the More menu, then go to Settings and Privacy. From there, you'll find Your Time on Facebook.

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